Egg borders

I've been here, but too busy with chorus-related construction projects (both fabric- and wood-related) to make or devote time to either blog or sew for pleasure. Before I was dropped into that time-suck, however, I had made good progress on some borders.

When I unfolded the 2 potential border fabrics, it was clear there wasn't going to be enough of either to make a substantial border.

The tan eggs fabric was too blah anyway, so I decided to use it on the back. The black piece, however, was bold enough to stand out. There wasn't much, and it was printed crookedly, so some careful fussy-cutting was involved, but I got enough out of it for a Sairey Strip.

Auditioning for visual impact

Then came the eggs.

After completing 55 of them, it was time to do some arranging. Did I need one more? Did I even need this many?

First I had to figure out the math: given that I wanted all the eggs to sit upright on all the borders, and they were 3"x4", and I had the potential of 56 of them, how would they be best arranged resulting in the most equal spacing around them? I figured out an equation which turned out to be bullshit:

If this had been valid, I'd've shown y and how I came up with the 1.11 value. But, as mentioned, it's bullshit.

When my mathematician husband finally worked out a general-purpose plug-'n'-chug-any-combination-of-variables equation, it took a whole sheet of paper! What he suggested as the best approach was to make educated guesses and work the math out from there.

As it turned out (hubby did the educated-guess exercise), 13 eggs arranged on each side (plus 4 for the corners) worked out great, probably because the flimsy dimensions closely matched the 3-4 ratio of the egg block dimensions. I was going to need one more egg. While wondering which hunk of fabric I was going to cut a 3"x4" piece from, and searching through all my scraps one more time hoping to find a piece of eggish fabric that had escaped notice, I discovered this little piece buried in the project bag. Egg 56!

Next challenge: there was 2-1/4" filler needed between all the eggs (either on the sides or at top & bottom), and I had used all the speckled black in the making of the eggs. Even if I did want to go shopping (which I didn't), I doubted I'd find more of it. I didn't have any plain (100% cotton) black, either (which seems odd, when I come to think about it). So I started auditioning the blacks I did have, but from the back. This moda "Zen Chic" print came the closest to imitating the same speckled effect:

Seems a shame to use the "wrong" side of such an interesting piece, but the "right" side wasn't being used either while just sitting in the drawer!

A quick check that the measurements were in the ballpark:

and then there were four:

The four Araucana eggs were set aside for the corners.

And that's where I'd been stuck for the last 3 weeks, scared. Scared because I was coming to the end of the moda piece, knew I had only enough for one more border, and had to make darn sure that my measurements were spot on when I cut it out. I was also up to my eyeballs in travel-knit fabric (making 20 pairs of pants for the chorus), so I didn't have time to work on it anyway. (That didn't stop my brain from messing with my dreams in the meantime.)

But, pants are done, another chorus project is well underway (traditionally, a hand-made gift from me to my Baritones, given at the annual Competition), and I finally had some guilt-free sewing-for-me time yesterday. Results in the next post!